“You seem surprised to find us here,” the man said. “I am,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting to find anyone.”
“We are everywhere,” the man said. “We are all over the country.”
“Forgive me,” I said, “but I don’t understand. Who do you mean by we?”
“Jewish refugees.”
I really didn’t know what he was talking about. I had been living in East Africa for the pasts two years and in those times the British colonies were parochial and isolated. The local newspaper, which was all we got to read, had not mentioned anything about Hitler’s persecution of the Jews in 1938 and 1939. Nor did I have the faintest idea that the greatest mass murder in the history of the world was actually taking place in Germany at that moment.
“Is this your land?” I asked him.
“Not yet,” he said.
“You mean you are hoping to buy it?”
He looked at me in silence for a while. Then he said, “The land is at present owned by a Palestinian farmer but he as given us permission to live here. He has also allowed us some fields so that we can grow our own food.”
“So where do you go from here?” I asked him. “You and all your orphans?”
“We don’t go anywhere,” he said, smiling through his black beard. “We stay here.”
“Then you will all become Palestinians,” I said. “Or perhaps you are that already.”
He smiled again, presumably at the naivety of my questions.
“No,” the man said, “I do not think we will become Palestinians.”
“Then what will you do?” Continue reading “Roald Dahl in Palestine”